Tegile Systems Shipped our 1,000th array and our CEO still has his hair

What a year it has been! We have grown our revenue over 350% YoY and continue to ramp up sales every quarter. When I started at Tegile Systems, there were barely 15 people in the company. Now we are fast approaching 200 Tegilians, all laser focused on continuing our phenomenal growth.

One thing is clear: leading edge IT organizations are voicing their opinion with their storage dollars. Just look at other new storage vendors: Nimble Storage had a great IPO last year, Pure Storage is posting impressive growth numbers as well. All this while the oligarchs maintain overall flat if not shrinking market share. Now, I understand that all combined, the two companies I mentioned plus Tegile Systems don’t add up to any of the oligarch’s share today, but it is all about growth momentum. Look at what happened in the storage market in the 2009 – 2010 timeframe. High growth storage companies such as 3PAR, Compellent and Isilon got snatched up to help fuel growth at the oligarchs. Will we see that happen again? Yep Perhaps. It is extremely difficult to re-architect legacy systems to compete with next generation systems that were built for flash and in-line data reduction. All of the legacy vendors have added flash into their existing systems, but none of them have optimized their performance and capacity profiles the way we have at Tegile. Hands down, our customers store more faster. More because we have in-line dedupe and compression. Faster, because these data reduction technologies have a multiplier effect on the effective size of our flash resources, increasing hit ratios for all applications.

Now, just to have some fun. You know, we in the storage vendor side of the business work in a very small circle and have probably worked with people at almost every storage company out there. If you could map LinkedIn connections, the storage market would look like a highly contagious flu on a CDC outbreak chart. So, we always treat our friends with respect, but like to have fun too. I saw my pal Joao Silva’s picture in a Pure Storage tweet about their CEO getting his head shaved because he lost a bet with his sales team. I am sure they had fun that day.

Tegile’s CEO, Rohit Kshetrapal, had a great day too. He realized that he’d never bet against our sales team and was able to keep his hair. Now, Rohit is not a vain man. He is very well balanced – just like our arrays. So just like we maintain a performance:capacity balance with SSD and HDDs, Rohit manages a balance between bald and bodacious.

In the coming year, many will stand and many of us new vendors will go up against each other, but at the end of the day, we are all attacking the oligarchs. There is a better way to store data in the virtualized world we live in, and depending on your requirements, I bet an upstart, as my friend Howard Marks likes to call us, has a better solution for you.